As a child,
Nhan Couch cooked about 300 rice cakes a day on a wood-burning stove to
sell in the markets. It was often difficult to find wood, so she
would sometimes use coconut or banana leaves to burn. "Sometimes
banana leaves got dry, the neighbors didnít care if you cut the dry banana
leaves. So I had to sit there, and if you were cooking with banana
leaves, you had to keep putting it in, just like paper. It burned
real quick."